MARIA loses movement in her head. She drops her sceptres into a pot. Her head rolls uncontrollably. She raises her hands to her breasts. The headdress falls. MARIA gets up. The MARIACHIS fall silent.
MARIA. No! I don’t want to die. Not yet.
Everyone makes way for her. She staggers round the banqueting table. When she reaches the edge she takes hold of the tablecloth, yanks it and overturns everything. The NUBIAN SLAVES try to run and help her. One of the MARIACHIS – suspiciously resembling Jorge Negrete – stops them. MARIA walks forward in silence. The white telephone rings. It is, as always, on the white toilet. MARIA turns, leans against the table, falls to her knees and crawls over to the telephone – and the toilet. She tries to get hold of the telephone. She drops it. DOLORES’ voice can be heard from the handset:
DOLORES (off). Hello? Hola? María? María? Answer me! (MARIA tries to speak, but cannot: the sleeping pills are taking effect.) María . . . What’s wrong, my love? Listen to me. I have something to tell you.
MARIA. Tell . . . tell your boyfriend . . . he has an errand to do tomorrow . . .
DOLORES. María Bonita, María del alma . . .
MARIA. To prepare a cute farewell for me, tell him . . .
DOLORES. María! I’m coming over. María, María de los Angeles!
MARIA. Let them bury me in the land of the sun . . . let them say that I’m sleeping, and . . . 22
DOLORES. I’m going to hang up . . . I’m coming . . .
MARIA. Dolor . . . Dolor . . . es . . . I don’t want to die, my love . . . (A click is heard as DOLORES hangs up. MARIA keeps hold of the handset.) I love you too. I am you, didn’t you know? We are both Dolores and María so that we don’t have to be us . . . I’m going . . . I’m going to be sick, Lolita . . . maybe that way it’ll go away . . . maybe . . . ayayay . . . Now you’ll all see who is Doña Diabla!23
During this scene, the NUBIAN SLAVES leave the set and the MARIACHIS turn and exit playing ‘Las Golondrinas.’ When MARIA lifts the lid of the toilet to be sick, she is alone on the set which is unlit except for the light which shines on her, kneeling, prostrate in front of the white toilet, trying to be sick until, exhausted, she sticks her head into the bowl. A frightening sound of drowning is heard, a deathly spasm, a terminal asphyxiation. The MARIACHIS, off, play and sing the complete ‘Canción Mixteca.’ The music gradually fades. The sound of feet running up stairs is heard. A bunch of keys nervously inserted. At last the door opens and DOLORES appears, now dressed soberly in a black raincoat, stockings and modern shoes, but with a 1940s hat. She screams when she sees bold MARIA, her head inside the toilet, runs over to her, takes out her dripping head, screams, weeps, rocks it in her arms, looking at it straight in the face. Then she drops it in her lap.
DOLORES. María, María Bonita, you should have trusted me. That asshole won’t write another line. He won’t threaten anyone ever again. Do you understand me, Mariquita? Why didn’t you understand me? I told you as I was leaving. I’ll kill the bastard, we’ll kill the pig . . . I did it for you, my holy sister, love of my life. Ayayay! Why didn’t you wait for me. Ayayayayay . . . (Suddenly, as if she had remembered something, she puts her hand over her mouth. She looks around suspiciously. She has left the door open. She looks at it in terror.) But don’t make a noise, María de los Angeles, Mamá can hear us. It would give her so much pleasure to know that you died younger than her, you know? She mustn’t find out . . . How wonderful . . . How wonderful . . . that gentleman . . . now won’t be able to tell the world . . . about your death . . . because nobody must find out . . . least of all Mamá . . . nobody has to know.. Everyone must believe that you never died, that you are beauty immortal . . . There will be no funeral ceremony, María Bonita. Nobody will be present at your burial . . . Except me . . . Your burial is today . . . this is the ceremony . . . nobody must know . . .
MARIA and DOLORES make up a female Pietá. DOLORES recites Luis Sandoval y Zapata’s sonnet ‘To a deceased actress’.24 This is the funeral ceremony.
DOLORES. ‘Here lies the sleeping purple, / Grace and charm and beauty, / And here lies that clarion of gentleness / Whose voice was lent to life’s sweet songs. . . ’ (She alternates between the sonnet and asking MARIA questions) What did you say to me this morning? I’m trying to remember, María. Something we should remember now, I know. Trust me, you said. It’ll upset Mamá if you and I die. Trust me. (Hesitates a moment) Trust me? You didn’t . . . You thought that I . . . I and that . . . that . . . (Puts her hand over her mouth, holding back nausea) You should have seen it. He offered me some third-rate champagne. Californian. Me! I broke the bottle. He laughed. With the smashed neck of his bottle of undrinkable champagne I slit his throat so that he could only drink his own blood . . . (She holds back her nausea. She composes herself quoting the sonnet, her voice strained) ‘Thou mad’st life’s loveliness surer. . . ’ He won’t laugh any more. (She interrupts herself. She looks around.) Trust me, you said. It’ll upset Mamá if you and I die. Will it upset Mamá? How? How? (She looks at the door in terror. She saves herself again in poetry.) ‘Verses owed thee their performance, and / Thou mads’t life’s loveliness surer; / Loving, icy, elusive, thou didst feign / So well. . . ’ (She looks at the altars.) Your altar. My altar. We’ve kept them there since we were little girls. To store our memories, our illusions, our prayers. Is that where the secret is? (Her attention is held by the FAN’s projector, which is sitting on the porcelain cistern of the toilet. DOLORES gently lifts MARIA’s head, lays it on the ground and gradually stands up, reciting under her breath the sonnet, which culminates in a requiem which is also an alleluia). ‘Thou didst feign / so well that even Death was uncertain / if thou didst simulate one dead or didst submit as one alive. . . ’ (Pause. Then suddenly) The camera, María? Isn’t the camera our salvation? Aren’t all our prayers met by the movie camera? Isn’t the camera our common altar, my love? (She goes over to the projector. She puts it on. As in the previous scene, the light blinds the audience.) Ah, look at you, how beautiful and in love, following Pedro Armendáriz to the revolution, Enamorada, Flor Silvestre, life’s loveliness. Look at me, following Pedro Armendáriz to the firing squad, Enamorada, Flor Silvestre . . . (She turns the projector to face the back of the set so that it projects the alternating images of the two stars on to the free space behind the banqueting table. Moving away from the projector) I’m going to let it run, María. Now I’ve understood you. Oh yes, my God I have understood you, grace and charm and beauty . . . Let our movies run forever, uninterrupted . . . Let Mamá hear us upstairs, let her hear our voices and die slowly, slowly, in her wheelchair, dressed like an Indian priestess, the old witch, thinking she can take away our lives because she gave them to us, that hypocritical whore who is older than all the dead. Let her die of anger listening to us and thinking we’re still alive, performing, living life’s loveliness, María de los Angeles, loving, icy, elusive, even Death is uncertain if thou dost simulate one dead or dost submit as one alive . . . (She stops for a moment, with a victorious air. She exclaims) ‘Here lies the sleeping purple.’ (Without turning her back on the projector she draws closer and closer to the door. Her words, all of them names of movies, are drowned out by the sound of the dialogues from those movies which correspondingly grow in volume.) Resurrection . . . Hidden River . . . Wonder Bar . . . Mare Nostrum . . . Evangeline . . . Juana Gallo . . . The Loves of Carmen . . . La Escondida . . . In Caliente . . . Ash Wednesday . . . The Little House . . . Vertigo . . . Beyond all Limits . . . La Malquerida . . . The Dove . . . French Can-Can . . . The Power and the Glory . . . Amok . . . La Otra . . . Lancer Spy . . . Corona Negra . . . Madame du Barry . . . Mesalina . . . Doña Diabla . . . Heroes and Sinners . . . El Monje Blanco . . . (DOLORES leans against the door.) Resurrection.
She closes the door. Metallic clanging is heard first. Then the sound of earth being shovelled. All mixed up with the dialogues and the images from the movies.25 Then silence. DOLORES walks back to her chair, stares at the audience, pours herself a cup
of tea, groans. MARIA gets up and walks over to her.
MARIA. It’s very early. What’s wrong?
DOLORES. They didn’t recognise me.
MARIA. Again?
End.
Notes
1. María Félix has been a goddess of Latin American cinema since the 1940s, and is most famed for her aggressive sensuality, which attracted a string of lovers that included Jorge Negrete and Frida Kahlo. She inspired artists like Diego Rivera to paint her, composers to write songs like María Bonita (Agustín Lara) and Je l’aime à mourir (Francis Cabrel), and bullfighters to dedicate fights to her. In machista society she was a revolutionary, a Pancho Villa in skirts, becoming a role model for many Latin American women yearning for independence. As an actress she worked with top international directors like Luis Buñuel and Jean Renoir but was never a convincing character actress, leaning heavily on vampy melodrama. She became typecast as a fierce, castrating woman in movies like Man Eater (1946), Peak of Dead Souls (1942), Doña Bárbara (1942), Soulless Woman (1943) and Doña Diabla (1943). Gossip columnists jeered at her ugly hands and accused her of disowning her own son because she was frightened he would undermine the myth of her eternal youth. Born in 1915 in Alamo, Sonoras, Mexico, Félix divided her time in 1996 between Paris, ‘my external exile’, and Mexico, ‘my internal exile.’
2. Dolores del Río was a pioneer, the first Latina actress to gain Hollywood fame. She was born in 1905 in Durango, Mexico, and educated in a convent. In 1921, she married the writer Jaime del Río. Director Edwin Carewe was struck by her dark beauty at a Mexico City tea party and invited her to Hollywood to appear in his film Joanna (1925). This launched her movie career, which had two distinct stages. The first was in 1930s Hollywood, where she became a universal symbol of beauty, elegance and mystique, playing an exotic Polynesian maiden in King Vidor’s Bird of Paradise (1931), dancing with Fred Astaire in Flying down to Rio (1933) and starring in movies like the screen adaptation of Tolstoy’s Resurrection (1927), Raoul Walsh’s What Price Glory? (1926), Ramona (1927), Madame du Barry (1934) and finally Orson Welles’ Journey into Fear (1942). The second stage of her career was in the 1940s during the ‘Golden Age’ of Mexican cinema. Under the direction of ‘El Indio’ Fernández, she became a symbol of Mexicanidad. Her simple beauty and forceful personality brought a lyrical power to movies like the classic María Candelaria (1943), in which Dolores is persecuted by a villainous landowner who kills the little pig that she is rearing for the village market. Other films of this era include Enamorada (1946) and Flor Silvestre (1943). She was married twice and was romantically linked to Orson Welles before his involvement with Rita Hayworth. She died aged 78 in Newport Beach, California, while rehearsing the part of Dolores in this play.
3. Orson Welles died after the play was written, on October 10, 1985, of a heart attack, while writing at his house in Hollywood.
4. A reference to the scene in Casablanca in which Ingrid Bergman reassures Humphrey Bogart that ‘we will always have Paris’.
5. A reference to a bolero by Lucho Gatica.
6. Porfirio Díaz was President of Mexico from 1877 to 1880 and from 1884 until 1911 when Madero’s revolution forced him to resign and flee into exile. He was a believer in the European Enlightenment ideas of progress and science. Octavio Paz describes him as ‘the most illustrious dictator in Spanish America’.
7. La Malinche was the Indian woman who seduced and then married the Spanish conquistador Hernan Cortés. To Mexicans she is more than just an historical figure; she is the symbol of an ongoing conflict of identity. Many of Mexico’s great painters, musicans and writers have taken her as a principal subject, including José Clemente Orozco who depicted her as the Mexican Eve. Malinchista is now a politically loaded adjective describing those who want Mexico to open itself to the outside world, but also used contemptuously, to denounce all those corrupted by foreign influences.
8. From a traditional son, originally from Santiago de Cuba, called Mamá, quiero saber de donde son los cantantes.’
9. This and Dolores’s next line are from the Italian version of the Internationale. If an English version is preferred, a translation would be: ‘Then comrades come rally, the last fight let us face’; and then, in the next line: ‘The Internationale unites the human race’.
10. Different versions of this tango are available on the soundtrack to Flying down to Rio and on collections of songs by Rudy Vallée, including Sing for your Supper (Conifer, 1989).
11. An extract from the song María Bonita, written for María Félix by the Mexican singer and songwriter Agustín Lara.
12. An extract from The Mixtec Song, translated in note 13.
13. The literal translation of this traditional Mexican mariachi song, The Mixtec Song, is: ‘How far I am from the land where I was born! / Intense nostalgia invades my thoughts; / and seeing myself so alone and sad, like a leaf in the wind, / I want to cry, I want to die of feeling. Oh land of the sun, I long to see you, now I live so far from light, from love, / and seeing myself so alone and sad, like a leaf in the wind, / I want to cry, I want to die of feeling.’ If the director or the performers feel it poses too great a vocal or audience challenge, they might consider replacing the song with the nostalgic ‘Orchids in the Moon light’: ‘When orchids bloom in the moonlight / And lovers vow to be true; / I still can dream in the moonlight / Of one dear night that we knew. / When orchids fade in the dawning / They speak of tears and goodbye; / Tho’ my dreams are shattered, / Like the petals scattered . . . ’
14. From Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra, Act 1, scene 5.
15. From a bolero by Lucho Gatica.
16. ‘La Doña’ was María Félix’ nickname in the media, and was the title for Paco Ignacio Taibo’s comprehensive biography of Félix, published in 1991.
17. A reference to Dolores del Río’s role in María Candelaria.
18. In the published Spanish version, María introduces herself as Maclovia, the character played by María Félix in the eponymous movie, directed by Emilio Fernández in 1948. In my discussions with Fuentes, we changed Maclovia to Lupe Vélez. Like Dolores del Río, Vélez was a Latina star in Hollywood. She was Douglas Fairbanks’ fiery leading lady in The Gaucho (1927), and subsequently played various tempestuous leads, for example in Griffith’s Lady of the Pavements (1929) and De Mille’s The Squaw Man (1931). She was as volatile in her personal life as she was on screen. After being ditched by Gary Cooper, she married Tarzan actor Johnny Weissmuller in 1933. They divorced in 1938, and she had a string of unhappy affairs. In 1944, Vélez had a long session with her make-up man and hairdresser, swallowed a bottle of barbiturates, adorned her room with flowers, slipped her head into the toilet and drowned herself.
19. An excellent version of this nostalgic Mexican song is by Jorge Negrete, highly appropriate considering María Félix’ romantic involvement with Negrete. The Spanish chorus, which is quoted later, is: México lindo y querido, / si muero lejos de tí, / que digan que estoy dormido / y que me traigan aquí. The translation is: Beautiful and beloved Mexico, / If I die far from you / let them say I am asleep / and let them bring me here.
20. A translation of a direct quote from The Mixtec Song – see note 13
21. Another quotation from the The Mixtec Song.
22. A quotation from México lindo y querido– see note 19.
23. ‘Doña Diabla’ refers to the nickname given to the character of Angela played by María Félix in the eponymous film, a melodrama about a Catholic high-society lady living a double life as a prostitute, directed by Tito Davison in 1948. Fuentes suggested that Doña Diabla should be translated as ‘the Devil’s own cunt.’
24. I have sought to find a 17th-century English equivalent to Sandoval y Zapata’s language. I have also tried to translate the imagery and musicality of Sandoval y Zapata’s poem, fragments of which Dolores uses and adapts at the end of the play. The cast and director may, however, wish to revert to the original Spanish of ‘A una cómica difunta’:
Aquí yace la púrpura dormida;
Aquí el garbo, el gracejo, la hermosura,
La voz de aquel clarín de la dulzura
donde templó sus números la vida . . .
La representación, la vida airosa
Te debieron los versos y más cierta,
Tan bien fingiste – amante, helada, esquiva –
Que hasta la Muerte se quedó dudosa
Si la representaste como muerta
O si la padeciste como viva.
25. Fuentes changed the play’s conclusive and linear ending in July 1992 while we were discussing the translation. He said an oneiric and ambiguous ending was most suitable to both the style and the structure of play. From this point in the text, the previous end had gone: ‘. . . All mixed up with the dialogue and images from the movies. Then total darkness. Music: ‘Orchids in the Moonlight’.
INTERVIEW WITH CARLOS FUENTES
SD: How has Orchids in the Moonlight been performed?
CF: It was originally taken by the American Repertory Theatre at Harvard where Robert Brustein liked it very much. It was well cast, with two black actresses. But it didn’t work because the director saw it as a feminist, realistic, psychological play, which it isn’t. It also had an interval, which it should not have had; and the magic of the play – the ambiguity, the oneiric, fantastic, Latin American, baroque overtones – was driven out. Then there was a Mexico City production which had two men playing María and Dolores which, for me, is the best so far because of its fringe, outsider quality. That was very baroque, grotesque, cartoon-like at times, and very funny. It worked as a comedy very well. Both of the actors have since died of AIDS, which is rather dramatic. Then there was a very serious production done in Madrid with two of Almodóvar’s favourite actresses, including Marisa Paredes. That had more of a dream-play dimension. Then there was an excellent radio production done by National Public Radio in New York, with very good sound effects: you can hear the play very well there.
Latin American Plays Page 20